If you think it's impossible to get a few private minutes with one of these voting machines you are crazy. I am not sure how you have been an election worker and still managed to come to that conclusion. In fact, you can easily get a few private HOURS with them. Ed Felten (one of the writers of this paper) annually takes photos of himself with unattended voting machines the night before Election Day.

It's better because if someone gives away your public email address to spammers, one of two things will be true:
(a) you know who did it and have the ability to block it, because spam comes to the address with the offender's unique tag, or
(b) the spam is automatically sent to the trash and you never see it, because it goes to the base email address.

Personally I only use one email account, but none of these setups is very hard to effect. It really depends how much of a problem spam is for you. With Gmail's excellent spam filtering, it isn't much of one for me, but the +tags can act as a second line of defense.

Sure I guess that would work, but I prefer not to annoy my friends and family with extra tags and funky punctuation. So its simpler to just have a separate gmail account, or a hotmail account... or whatever.

It's not like it's particularly complicated to work around that. You could blacklist email sent to you@gmail.com, except for those emails sent from whitelisted family members. Or you could combine the two: have my-private-email@gmail.com unfiltered to use for your friends and family, and only use the tag-filtering method for my-public-email@gmail.com. Mainly I just wanted to point out that Gmail +tags are not useless and "trivial to get around."

If by beautiful you mean trivial for spammers or anyone else who knows the first thing about google to get around, then yes.

It's not trivial to get around if you use it properly. Set Gmail to filter anything sent to you@gmail.com to your trash. Then, every time you give out your email address, add a tag (as in you+tag@gmail.com) and allow whitelisted tags through the filter. Voila -- spam-blocking email address tags that are not trivial to get around.

Posted
by
kdawsonon Thursday August 23, 2007 @11:40AM
from the giant-sucking-sound dept.

eldavojohn writes "The United States is suffering again from a massive trade deficit — $38.3 billion in 2006. And it's been going on since 2002. From the press release: 'In 2006, Asia supplied 60 percent of all US imports of advanced technology products. Europe supplied more than 20 percent, and North America more than 15 percent.'"

Just taking the opportunity to give a little economics lesson as it arose, as the concept of opportunity cost is not very widely understood. I wasn't being sarcastic or suggesting that we should farm more food and lay less fiber.